Italian senate approves fertility restriction

(January 1, 2004 - Reproductive Medicine)

Italy's Senate approved tough new rules on December 11, 2003, restricting fertility treatments to heterosexual couples who live together and are of childbearing age.

The law also bars egg or sperm donation, as well as the use of surrogate mothers, and rules out treatment for gays, single people, and elderly women.

It forbids freezing embryos for use at a later date - including after a spouse has died - and says no more than three embryos can be created at one time and all must be implanted in a woman's womb.

The legislation, previously passed by the lower Chamber of Deputies, also outlaws experiments on embryos, such as cloning or tinkering with their genetic makeup.

It imposes tough sanctions: fines of $363,000 to $726,000 for using donors, and 10- to 20-year jail terms and fines up to $1.21 million for doctors who try to clone humans, news reports said.

The law was bitterly criticized by members of the center-left opposition, as well as some female lawmakers and the country's largest gay rights group.

Until the law's approval, fertility treatment in Italy was largely unregulated, with couples, including women in their 60s, flocking to Italy from abroad to take advantage of the vacuum in such areas as upper-age limits for recipients of donated eggs.

For 20 years, the fierce resistance of Roman Catholic legislators to any compromise had prevented Parliament from passing a law regulating fertility treatment. But with a center-right majority in place, the Senate passed the law 169-92, with five abstentions. The text must return to the lower chamber for a purely technical reading, after which it can be signed into law.

However, as soon as the Senate gave its approval, some legislators including Alessandra Mussolini, who has long battled for women's rights, announced a petition-signing effort to hold a referendum to overturn the law. Other lawmakers announced a national protest to voice their opposition, and a leading Italian fertility doctor, Severino Antinori, promised a legal fight, arguing the law violated Italians' civil rights.

When the lower chamber passed the law in 2002, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology criticized it, saying it could endanger the lives of women and their babies since all three embryos must be implanted in the uterus and cannot be frozen for later use.

In traditional fertility treatments, doctors give women fertility drugs to stimulate their ovaries to produce more eggs than usual. They then harvest the eggs, fertilize them to create embryos, and implant one or two in the womb. They freeze the others to use the next time, if the first try fails.

Without embryo freezing, the only other proven approach is to harvest eggs each time. The procedure is painful and overdoing fertility drugs can cause problems for the woman. This article was prepared by Women's Health Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

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